Monday, June 7, 2010

Apparently Netflix (NFLX) will be available on your Apple(AAPL) iPhone this summer. Nice news for those of us who continue to wonder why we pay $90 per month simply to use a product that costs $100 at Walmart...

Netflix shares are up three dollars on the news. Interesting to see this news come out right after AT&T talked about going towards a usage model for pay plans, as Netflix will certainly be a bandwidth-hog....T shares are up 1.5%.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Wal-Mart figures if it can master logistics better than their suppliers can, then they may as well go ahead and take over deliveries, leaving suppliers to focus on production and passing on the cost savings to customers.

The retailer aims to take over U.S. transportation services from suppliers in an effort to reduce the cost of hauling goods. Wal-Mart is contacting all manufacturers that provide products to its more than 4,000 U.S. stores and Sam's Club membership warehouse clubs, says Kelly Abney, Wal-Mart's vice-president of corporate transportation.

The goal: to handle suppliers' deliveries in instances where Wal-Mart can do the same job for less, then use those savings to reduce prices in stores, Abney says. Wal-Mart believes it has the scale to allow it to ship everything from dog food to lawn chairs more efficiently than the companies that produce the goods. "It has allowed our suppliers to focus on what they do best, manufacturing products for us," he says. "With lower costs usually comes increased sales."

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Warren Buffett continues to testify at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today. It's pretty interesting because this commission is MUCH less willing to attack this man, compared to the way Goldman Sachs employees were treated.

If anyone needs some extra summer reading, below is a little bit of the introduction toInside Job: The Looting of America's Savings & Loans, written by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo. Their research into the now extinct Centennial Savings & Loan is a fantastic look at the dangerous mix of brokered deposits and the riskier loan portfolios they necessitate.

Coauthors Steve Pizzo and Mary Fricker were jarred to attention by thrift
deregulation's fallout when tiny, conservative Centennial Savings and Loan in
their rural Northern California hometown of Guerneville began acting strangely
in December 1982 (two months after the signing of the Garn-St Germain Act)
and announced it was going to pay $ 1 3 million cash for a construction company.
Pizzo was editor of the Guerneville weekly, the Russian River News, and Fricker
was news editor. Pizzo wrote a news analysis highly critical of Centennial's plan
to spend seven times its net worth' on a construction company, and he began
aggressive coverage of a succession of strange happenings at Centennial Savings
and Loan.
Centennial officers suddenly were awash with money. Their names popped
up in complex real estate transactions documented at the county recorder's office.
Out-of-town visitors from places like Holland, Las Vegas, and Boston mysteri-
ously came and went, taking money with them. Still the thrift's financial state-
ments recorded phenomenal growth. And the small-town rumor mill geared up
to churn out dozens of explanations for this bizarre behavior. In the Russian
River News, Pizzo began asking some fairly obvious questions of the Centennial
officers: "Where is all this money coming from? " "Who are you lending it to,
and why?" "How can you justify these extravagant salaries, benefits, perks, planes, luxury cars, boats, and trips?" Was this, Pizzo asked, the proper role for a savings and loan, heretofore the most conservative, predictable, and reliable of all American financial institutions?

Pizzo's journalistic probings infuriated Erv Hansen, the president of Cen-
tennial Savings, and he exploded. He dispatched his assistant to complain to
the paper's publisher. Periodically he threatened that tellers at Centennial would monitor withdrawals, and if they were substantial, he would sue the News for causing a run on the thrift. Drunk in a local bar one night, Hansen told Pizzo's

business partner, Scott Kersnar, "You tell your partner he better stop sticking
his nose where it doesn't belong or I'll do to him what 1 did to that San Diego
reporter on that stock manipulation deal." Pizzo had no idea what had happened
to the San Diego reporter, but he took the warning seriously because he had
already discovered that some of those customers buzzing around Centennial's
loan window had organized crime backgrounds.
For four years Pizzo pursued the Centennial Savings and Loan story, and
gradually his Russian River News articles about Centennial Savings found their
way outside tiny Guerneville. They circulated quietly at the Federal Home Loan
Bank in San Francisco and Washington and at the Justice Department. In late
1985 Centennial collapsed — $165 million was missing.